Web Feed Discovery and Integration Service

Consumers of Earth science data are increasingly using multiple geophysical parameters and related georeferenced information to perform their investigations. For example, researchers studying the migration patterns of marine animals are interested in both the physical and biological processes within the ocean and therefore utilize sea surface temperature and ocean color data together.

They might also use other sources of data and information, such as in-situ observations, photographs, maps, news articles, and even eyewitness reports to aid their investigations. Rich Site Summary (RSS) feed extensions designed to share georeferenced information (GeoRSS) and data (DataGeoRSS) provide a key for integrating information and data.

We will deploy a Web Feed Discovery and Integration (WFDI) service that provides a registry for cataloging and automatically discovering GeoRSS and DataGeoRSS feeds. We will build technologies to find GeoRSS feeds on the web and scraper technologies to create DataGeoRSS feeds from online data holdings. The WFDI Client will provide the ability to i) discover feeds through its interface to the feed registry, ii) subscribe to feeds, iii) filter feeds to find specific items within a feed, iv) visualize the georeferenced information and data on a map and v) enable cross-feed correlation.

This latter capability is a powerful technique that exploits commonalities across disparate feeds to combine data sets in meaningful ways and thereby enable the discovery of new information.